The present invention relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly, to scheduling heterogeneous traffic in B3G/4G cellular networks with multiple channels.
Given the popularity and adoption of media applications, cellular networks are marching towards B3G/4G networks with the promise of providing high data rates and the ability to support such a multitude of applications. Further, one of the main goals of the long-term evolution (LTE) project of these cellular systems is the convergence towards an all-IP network, where all applications are envisioned to be carried over IP. Given these objectives, cellular networks must be tailored to efficiently carry not just data traffic, but also a wide variety of heterogeneous traffic such as data, VoIP, streaming applications, etc. One of the key design elements in such an endeavor is the base station traffic scheduler.
While there have been several works that have designed schedulers for individual traffic types and traffic parameters, they cannot be used for optimizing multiple traffic types in parallel. There have been some works that design schedulers for data and voice applications by providing strict priority for one over the other. Hence, they do not have the ability to flexibly trade-off resources between the different traffic types, which in turn is essential for traffic flows that belong to different quality if service QoS classes. Hence, the design of an efficient scheduler that handles heterogeneous traffic types in tandem along with the ability to flexibly allocate resources between them deserves significant attention.
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is the desired air interface technology for B3G/4G cellular systems. There have been works that have proposed resource allocation strategies for assigning users and data to the multiple OFDM sub-channels. However, they focus only on rate and do not consider heterogeneous traffic parameters like rate, delay, jitter, etc. Further, they also do not focus on the complexity or communication overhead of the mechanisms. Hence, the design of a low complexity, low overhead, high performance scheduler capable of handling heterogeneous (data and voice) traffic in OFDM cellular systems, forms the topic of this invention.
Accordingly, there is a need for a low complexity, low overhead, high performance scheduler capable of handling heterogeneous (data and voice) traffic in OFDM cellular systems.